I was 19, gay and ready to be ‘cured’ by conversion therapy

I was 19, gay and ready to be ‘cured’ by conversion therapy

Born into a Baptist family, Garrard Conley was sent for conversion therapy to ‘treat’ his sexual identity. As his brave and bracing memoir is adapted into a film, he reveals why he still believes he is ‘one of the lucky ones’

Garrard Conley: ‘I’ve had to fight against the sneaking suspicion that I am being led astray by Satan.’
Photograph: Caroll Taveras for the Observer

Here’s what Garrard Conley had to surrender the morning he arrived at the Love in Action facility in Memphis, Tennessee in 2004: his phone, his wallet, his driving licence and a Moleskine journal in which he wrote his short stories. A blond boy confiscated the journal and yanked a bunch of pages free from the binding. “And he said, in a voice free of emotion: ‘False Image’,” recalls Conley in Boy Erased, his elegant memoir about the year in which his southern Baptist upbringing collided with his sexual awakening as a gay man.

“False Image”, a key tenet of Love in Action (LIA), referred to anything and everything suggestive of Conley’s homosexuality. Detecting and destroying FIs was how you got the gay out. “The concept is stolen from Alcoholics Anonymous, except AA doesn’t just have you stay in a place all day, monitored,” says Conley. He was 19 when he entered LIA for a two-week evaluation. That was 14 years ago, the year – his mother likes to joke – in which they were abducted by aliens, a metaphor for the hallucinatory nature of the family’s crisis, when Conley’s father gave him an ultimatum: “You’ll never set foot in this house again if you act on your feelings. You’ll never finish your education.” Conley’s response was: “Fair enough.”

There was nothing fair about it, of course, but if your father was a Billy Graham-loving southern Baptist minister and you’d been raised to believe that hell was real, and if you’d grown up in a world in which pastors preach that evolution is a Satanic lie, perhaps you, too, would consider same-sex attraction to be a sickness. “That whole environment was just permeated with what my parents believed was a literal interpretation of the Bible,” Conley says when we meet at a café in New York, where he now lives. “It’s hard for me to reconstruct because it was so familiar to me for so long and now it feels so distant.”

Home truths: Garrard Conley with his mother and father in the late 80s.

Torture is a strong word, but if we get a museum that honours the centuries of suffering inflicted on queer people, a whole wing will need to be dedicated to that unique form of persecution known as conversion, or reparative, therapy, by which zealots acting under the banner of faith have sought to turn one sexual instinct into another. Conley’s story is far from unique, and far from the worst. In the US, research suggests that 700,000 adults have undergone such treatment, about half of them as teenagers. The methods are cruel and frequently violent, from applying electric shocks while being forced to watch gay porn, to mind control games aimed at persuading LGBT “patients” their desires are rooted in dysfunctional or “disempowering” relationships with their mothers.

At LIA the message was unequivocal: homosexuality meant unhappiness, isolation and death. Conley recounts a story in which a 19-year-old “defector” was forced to submit to a mock funeral, as other members read out his obituary, describing his slow decline into HIV and then Aids. Stories like these were not uncommon at LIA, renamed Restoration Path in 2012, and widely considered to be the first modern “ex-gay” ministry predicated on changing the sexual orientation of gay men and women. Among the first to raise the alarm about its methods was founding member John Evans, who left in 1975 after a friend, distraught by his failure to convert to straight, killed himself. “They’re destroying people’s lives,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1993. “If you don’t do their thing, you’re not of God, you’ll go to hell. They’re living in a fantasy world.”

When Conley handed over his notebook that day, it was part of a series of rules and prohibitions designed to maximise LIA’s mind control over patients during their treatment and beyond. Other rules included restrictions on where residents could travel within Memphis, on their dressing and grooming (no “muscle shirts”; no sideburns “below the top of the ear”) and on how they engaged with the secular world (no listening to Beethoven or Bach, or entering “non-Christian bookshops”, for example). Women were forbidden to wear “mannish/boyish” clothes, whatever that might mean, and men had to avoid “campy” behaviour. Conley later gave his LIA handbook to the law firm McDermott, Will & Emery, which works with the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC to archive LGBTQ history. “They took my book and analysed it to see whether it matched what they knew about cults, and it did,” says Conley. “Of course, I knew it operated as a cult, on some level, but it was still a shock. LIA felt like everything I’d ever encountered in my youth, only more distilled and written down.”

Today Conley seems relaxed and loose, attuned to himself and his place in the world, with quick, amused eyes. But it took effort for him to get to this point. “Every time I’ve read a book or ingested a new historical fact that my Baptist upbringing taught me to reject, I’ve had to fight against the sneaking suspicion that I am being led astray by Satan,” he says. Like other gay teens, Conley went through the motions of having a girlfriend as a way to “cure” himself, but he was also a voracious reader who found in novels a counterweight to the Bible that helped expand the horizons of his world. “I always say literature saved my life – it’s the one dogmatic thing I can say,” he says. “It sounds silly now, but I believed that these writers were speaking to me.” He recalls the experience of reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in college as “like an electric current flowing through me”, and became convinced that the novelist was creating a metaphor for LGBTQ people in the character of Hester Prynne – forced to wear the scarlet letter for the crime of infidelity.

At a small liberal arts college in Arkansas, freed from smalltown bigotries, Conley found himself caught between the tug of his upbringing, on the one hand, and his new freedoms on the other. He withdrew from church, wore a Radiohead T-shirt, read Dostoevsky and Gertrude Stein and defended evolution in conversations with a fellow student, whom he calls David, while fantasising about how their bodies might feel curled into one another. Instead, David raped Conley in his dorm room later that day. “I’d been unable to move from the bed where he had placed me afterwards – I believed that God was punishing me physically for my mental transgressions,” writes Conley. A few weeks later, David called Conley’s mother and outed her son. “David had trumped me. The knowledge of my homosexuality would seem more shocking than the knowledge of my rape; or, worse, it would seem as though one act had inevitably followed the other, as though I’d had it coming to me.”

Many nice liberal audiences that have had no experience of those smaller places are completely incredulous

Conley is gentle on his parents, and in general reluctant to judge anyone involved. “I question whether or not I do it out of stubbornness or actual compassion,” he says. “Given my experiences, I’m very resistant to having people tell me what I should believe, and so I don’t like easy routes out.” He finds liberal handwringing almost as obnoxious as conservative pieties. “I’ve met many nice liberal audiences that have had no experience of those smaller places, and who are completely incredulous – very well-meaning, but maddening, too, because this is a lot of the country,” he says. “It shouldn’t come as a shock. Look at who we elected.”

In many ways, Conley’s parents are southern clichés – his father a quarterback in high school, his mother a cheerleader, both deeply religious. They married young. But Conley is too thoughtful a writer to let such clichés escape scrutiny. In Boy Erased he gives his parents histories. He lets us know that his father grew up watching his own father tie his mother to a chair in order to beat her. He shows his mother’s capacity for humour. In Memphis one evening, suffocating under the rigid disciplines imposed by LIA, she essentiallyjailbreaks him by leaving the “approved” Hampton Inn they are staying at during his two-week evaluation, for dinner at a fancy hotel in an off-limits section of Memphis. There, she jokes about an idea for a TV series, Preachers’ Wives Gone Wild, while he surreptitiously observes their handsome waiter.

Among the ironies of conversion therapies such as LIA is the fact that they are run and managed largely by gay men who have been through the programme themselves, renounced their past and now seek to make others do the same. Conley characterises them by their “ex-gay smiles” in which the corners of their lips “stretched beyond the limits of normalcy”.

One such person was John Smid, former executive director of LIA and a gay man and Christian who would eventually admit that he’d “never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual”. Today Smid lives in Paris, Texas in a same-sex marriage. But when Conley met him in 2004, he was a diehard proselytiser for conversion. It was his idea to expand LIA’s mission from adults to teenagers. Although compassionate towards well-meaning parents who sent their children to places like LIA, Conley struggles to find such generosity for Smid. “We did become close many years later, and I was able to understand his story, but I also feel he should be spending every day of his life trying to raise awareness for what he did, and apologising to the families he affected,” he says. “My family never got that apology.”

Today Conley believes his father has come to accept his homosexuality, but the wounds are not entirely healed. “Everyone’s feelings are just very hurt,” he admits. “My dad feels that I don’t understand the pressure that he has from all of this. The community has disinvited him from certain revivals because my name comes up, he’s lost members who just walked out. Meanwhile, my mom’s stuck in this in-between, between a very fundamentalist preacher husband and a left-leaning queer son and that’s not a good place to be in.” He compares his father’s beliefs to a game of Jenga – in which players take turns removing pieces from a tower of wooden blocks until the structure collapses. “All his tenets are at the bottom, and it feels very solid, but if you move one block, everything becomes unbalanced. And the one he can’t move, that would bring it all down, is homosexuality, because it’s all tied in to the literal interpretation of the Bible.” He understands why liberal Americans make fun of places like his home city of Mountain Home, a small Arkansas town in the Ozarks, but he also finds the stereotypes about working-class America – from either direction – silly and unhelpful.

Meanwhile, the man who was saved by books now gets weekly affidavits of the impact his own book, first published in the US in 2016, is making. “This kid sent me this beautiful letter about how he found my book in his local library and couldn’t bring it home because his parents would see it, so he would read it in small increments until he finished it,” he says. “It was one of the most beautifully written letters I’ve read. He said, ‘I think I’m going to get through this, but it’s just really hard and I don’t know how to.’ It made me sob, so I sent it to my publicist, and she sent it to my editor and they decided to send him all these books, with a note to say it had been won in a sweepstake. Every book had a gay character in it, but it wasn’t obvious – you couldn’t tell from the blurbs.”

Famous friends: Garrard Conley and Nicole Kidman on the set of Boy Erased.

Boy Erased has been adapted into a film, due for release this autumn. Directed by Joel Edgerton, it stars Russell Crowe as Conley’s father and Nicole Kidman as his mother. Early last autumn, as filming commenced, a producer called Conley to ask if he knew where Russell Crowe was. “How the fuck would I know where Russell Crowe is?” he replied. “Isn’t he on set?” He wasn’t, as it turned out. Instead, Crowe had taken a private plane to Mountain Home to attend a Baptist service led by Conley’s father. “My dad called up two hours later, and he said: ‘Well, you’ll never guess what just happened,’ and I said, ‘Did Russell Crowe just show up at your church?’” Conley laughs uncomfortably at the memory. “It made a little bit of a scene – it’s a very small town, a lot of people have been on meth,” he says. “And then Russell Crowe comes in with his entourage and sits down. I was told my dad paused in his sermon for about two minutes, before continuing.”

Crowe went to great lengths to study Conley’s father, even coming away from Mountain Home with his lapel pin, a wooden cross from the Galilee, that he wore throughout filming. On set he sent a case of watches to Conley, asking him to select the one his dad might wear. “Of course, I didn’t know,” laughs Conley. “I just knew my dad didn’t ever want anything skinny because it made him too effeminate, so I chose one of those big watch bands.” Conley, happily married to his husband since February 2017, has recently finished his first novel, set in the early 19th century during the Second Great Awakening, when America was galvanised by a wave of religious revival meetings. It’s been a relief, he says, not to be writing about himself any more. “I’ve reached the limit,” he says. “I’ve been talking about this non-stop. I care about the issue, but I’ve just got to take a break. It’s like re-traumatising yourself every time.”

It’s been 14 years since Conley checked himself out of LIA and called his mother to take him home. “I didn’t have to leave my parents behind,” he says. He counts himself among the lucky ones.

• Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family by Garrard Conley is published by William Collins at £9.99. To order a copy for £8.49 visit guardianbookshopcom

An extract from Boy Erased

MONDAY 7 JUNE 2004

John Smid stood tall, square shouldered, beaming behind thin wire-rimmed glasses and wearing the khaki slacks and striped button-down that have become standard fatigues for evangelical men across the country. The rest of us sat in a semicircle facing him, all dressed according to the dress code outlined in our 274-page handbooks. Men: Shirts worn at all times, including periods of sleep. T-shirts without sleeves not permitted, whether worn as outer- or undergarments, including‘muscle shirts’ or other tank tops. Facial hair removed seven days weekly. Sideburns never below top of ear. Women: Bras worn at all times, exceptions during sleep. Skirts must fall at the knee or below. Tank tops allowed only if worn with a blouse. Legs and underarms shaved at least twice weekly. ‘The first thing you have to do is recognise how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God,’ Smid said. We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s 12-Step programme, a set of principles equating the sins of infidelity, bestiality, paedophilia and homosexuality to addictive behavior such as alcoholism or gambling: a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for what counsellors referred to as our ‘sexual deviance’.

An orange sun was climbing its way up the back of the hazy white-washed buildings in the distance. I waited for the sunlight to spill over, but the longer I watched, the longer it seemed to take. I wondered if this was how time was going to work in this place: minutes as hours, hours as days, days as weeks. ‘Once you enter the group, you’ll be well on your way to recovery,’ Smid said. ‘The important thing to remember is to keep an open mind.’ I was here by my own choice, despite my growing scepticism, despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler. God, I prayed, making my way down the narrow hallway to the main room, the fluorescents ticking in their metal grids, I don’t know who You are any more, but please give me the wisdom to survive this.